Fusion Energy at an Inflection Point

KATE FOWLER: Thanks for joining our podcast today. I'm your host, Kate Fowler, Global Head of Nuclear at Willis Towers Watson, helping developers, operators, and investors navigate and mitigate the long-term risk of fusion and nuclear energy life cycles.

Commercial fusion is moving from scientific ambition to industrial reality, and policy, capital, and risk frameworks are racing to keep up. I was recently at the Fusion Industry Association's Annual Policy Conference where developers, policymakers, insurers, and advisors were all focused on the same question. What does it take to bring fusion energy to market?

In this short series, I sat down with three fusion technology developers-- Zap, FusionX, and Tokamak Energy-- the global law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman to hear how their respective industries are approaching the technical, legal, and risk challenges of commercial fusion. These are quick conversations recorded live with people shaping what comes next for fusion energy and what it will take to turn breakthrough science into a bankable, insurable, and scalable power source. Join us for this first conversation with Zap.

I'm here with Benjamin Levitt, Vice President of Research and Development with Zap Energy. Can you briefly just tell me about Zap Energy and what you guys are doing?

BENJAMIN LEVITT: Absolutely. So Zap Energy is a private fusion company. We're based out of Seattle. Company was founded in 2017. It's a spin-out of efforts at the University of Washington. Two of our three co-founders are current and past professors in the aerodynamics and physics department.

And so the concept is based on a Z-pinch, and specifically it's based on a flowing Z-pinch. We're a company of about 150 people, and we are also part of the DOE Milestone Program, which is a really exciting program to-- partnership of private companies with public efforts.

KATE FOWLER: All right. So there's a lot of noise in the energy industry right now, in particular around clean energies and baseload energies. Why fusion? Why now? And what problem does fusion solve that nothing else can?

BENJAMIN LEVITT: Fusion is really the holy grail of all energy sources. It's clean, carbon-free, there's no long-term radioactive waste. It has higher energy density by anything else, including fission. And so it ticks-- all the boxes you want in an energy source, it ticks.

Also, the fueling is abundant. It uses isotopes of hydrogen, which are the most abundant element in the universe. So it doesn't use things underground that we have to mine, and certain countries that have it and don't have it. And that also accounts for fission as well. It doesn't use uranium that needs to be enriched and is also dual use for weapons. So it doesn't have any of that stuff. And so really, it is the ultimate energy source. And so that's the why.

KATE FOWLER: And for those kind of not in the tech space, you said there's an abundance of hydrogen. Where does that come from? Where are you getting your hydrogen fuel for the technology?

BENJAMIN LEVITT: The hydrogen that is used in most but not all fusion concepts is two isotopes. So isotopes are heavier cousins of hydrogen. They have one extra nucleus-- one extra neutron in their nucleus. One is deuterium and one is tritium. Deuterium exists in seawater abundantly, and so you can get deuterium on planet Earth, enough to power fusion power plants for-- on the order of a billion years, long enough that we can make future plans.

Tritium is a little bit trickier. It actually has to be bred through reactions that happen inside the fusion power plant. And so you do a process which is called bootstrapping. You can start your operations with deuterium, and you have a breeding process within the power plant that breeds tritium. And so those are your two sources of deuterium and tritium.

KATE FOWLER: So it sounds like we've got the fuel figured out, but I'm sure you've heard this is a reputation in the fusion industry, that it's always 10 to 20 years away from commercialization. What has changed in the last 12 months with Zap or just the industry that's proving that that timeline for actual technology deployment is much quicker than what people may think it is.

BENJAMIN LEVITT: So the myth or the reality that fusion has been 30 years away, it's hard to argue against that. Here we are. We've been working on fusion since right after the Manhattan Project in the 1950s. And so nearly 80 years on, we're still working on it.

But let's keep in mind that that effort has been start and stop and never actually been that well funded. So fusion efforts haven't been that big. And so what's changed now is a confluence of several things, including things like climate change, the advent of AI, and the increased energy needs on our infrastructure, national security needs. All those things have made a confluence that we really need this new energy source, and that means that funding has skyrocketed. And so that's really what's accelerating fusion.

There are certain concepts which are accelerating for particular technological advancements that have happened. So there are magnetic confinement schemes that use new materials. So there are high-temperature superconducting materials that make particular configurations more accessible, like tokamaks or stellarators. That doesn't apply to all of it. That does not apply to Zap Energy. In fact, this technology could have been done at another time, but it needed really the funding and the attention.

KATE FOWLER: So when you think about scaling to the grid, what's the single biggest risk that keeps investors or you up at night? And what do you need from the risk and insurance community to support de-risking and bankability of the technology?

BENJAMIN LEVITT: That's an excellent question, and it really is a different answer for different efforts. What should be realized is that the global fusion effort is not one particular attack on the goal of commercial fusion. There are many different concepts. Each one is a different star in a jar. Each one is a different jar for getting terrestrial fusion to work. And so ones that are based on particular technologies will have a certain risk from the insurance point of view. Will a tokamak undergo instabilities that destroy the vessel, for example?

For us, we have more physics risk. And if you can put to bed that physics risk, then the engineering risk is actually quite low from the insurance point of view. And then there's other concepts such as laser-based concepts. So the answer is maybe a little bit unsatisfying, but it's a distributed answer. And each approach has different needs and different risks that come along with it.

KATE FOWLER: So what about things like decommissioning or some of the early finance risks for startups? Surety and things that may be difficult if you don't have the strength of a balance sheet of a company that's been around for 50 years.

BENJAMIN LEVITT: Decommissioning is a good question. That's part of the reason why Zap operates pure deuterium right now. So adding tritium is really where you add in not the long-lived radioactive isotopes that you get in fission, but more like short and medium-term on the order of tens of years, up to 100 years. So there is a short-term radioactive issue, and that comes into play when you're doing a decommissioning.

We want to operate deuterium for as long as possible, including getting to a breakeven-- what's called scientific breakeven using deuterium fuel. The plan ultimately for a power plant is to use deuterium-tritium, but do not introduce tritium until you are absolutely ready for that. And so the risk has been burned down on the technology. And so the equation-- or the risk equation that would be from the insurance point of view is well defined at that point.

KATE FOWLER: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

BENJAMIN LEVITT: Cool.

KATE FOWLER: Next, I spoke with FusionX.

All right. I am here with Stuart Allen, CEO of FusionX. Nice to have you, Stuart.

STUART ALLEN: Thank you.

KATE FOWLER: Can you tell me a little bit about FusionX and what you guys are working on right now?

STUART ALLEN: Yeah, sure. So FusionX was founded five years ago, primarily to seek to connect fusion startups and capital providers. We were conscious of the fact that the capital needs of fusion were going to accelerate very rapidly, and to that date had largely been financed by VCs that probably didn't have pockets deep enough to fund the full pathway to commercialization.

But you don't have to look at issues around investing in financing fusion to realize that you need to look at an awful lot more risks and the retirement of those risks, because retirement risk makes things more vulnerable. And there's a process along the path to commercialization of risk retirement.

KATE FOWLER: So that's probably a good lead-in to my first question. So with everything going on in the energy sector right now-- energy security, the need for more energy with electrification-- why fusion? Why now? And what problems does fusion solve that nothing else in this space really can right now?

STUART ALLEN: Good questions. So we really first became excited about fusion when the-- CFS's magnet breakthrough. So the advent of high-temperature superconducting magnets. And the extent of that really made fusion look like it was shifting from possible through probable to likely, more a question of when, not if.

I think the prospect of fusion delivering clean, always-on-baseload power is compelling. We need to retire an awful lot of coal, certainly. Gas, probably, energy around the world, while at the same time increasing the output of energy to support AI and electrification, all of these things you've said. So in the long term, fusion has a very important place in the energy mix.

KATE FOWLER: So a lot of what you said, hearing the same conversation on the small modular reactor side of the world. What is the differentiator of fusion versus SMRs for those who aren't necessarily super familiar with the technological side of things?

STUART ALLEN: Well, Small Modular Reactor, as the name suggests, is a fission reactor. And it has all the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear fission, disadvantages of which are not shared by nuclear fusion. So no long-lived nuclear waste. The default state is to stopping, not keeping going, so it's no risk of uncontrolled reactions, and so forth.

That's not to say that fusion doesn't have any of those attributes. There is nuclear waste. It's not long lived. It's far less problematic. Clearly, a nuclear fusion power station will be an industrial facility. There will be some hazards. You will put a fence around it. You won't want children poking it with pointy sticks. But it's hazardous in the same way that an LNG plant is hazardous or a petrochemical plant is hazardous.

KATE FOWLER: So everything has risks, just different risk profile than what we see with the fission industry.

STUART ALLEN: A markedly more benign risk profile, but risks nonetheless.

KATE FOWLER: All right. So fusion has had a reputation for always being 10, 20, 30 years away. What has your company or the industry altogether done in the last 12 months or so that prove that that timeline is actually changing, in addition to what you talked about already with the high-temperature superconductors? Are there other things that are helping move that forward?

STUART ALLEN: Yeah, there's obviously-- there's the magnet breakthrough. There's the Lawrence Livermore breakthrough in the laser side. There's advancements down a variety of pathways to commercially viable fusion. And the pace of advancement and the funding to support further advancement is growing all the time. So there's a momentum now, and a growing momentum, an acceleration in progress, which suggests that this will happen not on that never, never, 30 years away horizon.

That's not to say there's certainty about when it will happen. But optimists-- hyper optimists would say in 2028. Anyone who's saying 2045 is pessimistic. So consensus, sometime in the mid '30s.

KATE FOWLER: And the realists sit somewhere in the middle.

STUART ALLEN: Yeah.

KATE FOWLER: Talking about the investment in it-- so thinking about scaling to the grid, what's the single biggest risk that keeps investors or you up at night? And what do you need from the risk and insurance community to support de-risking of the assets and to expedite that path to commercialization?

STUART ALLEN: Well, I think that-- I mean, the first thing is the realization and acceptance of the risk profiles of fusion plants are markedly different from those of fission. More akin, as I said to some other more standard form industrial facility. Some understanding of those things so that the risk can be priced appropriately.

I think the biggest risk that's probably less insurable, apart from unless you do credit enhancement products and so forth, is the financing of these things. Because the first of a kind is going to be expensive, and there will be a pretty steep learning curve. So I'm confident within reasonably short order, they will be markedly less expensive. But the first of the kind will be expensive.

KATE FOWLER: Yeah, it's that magical n-th of a kind that everybody talks about across the board.

STUART ALLEN: Yeah. What's the number that replaces the n? Is it 2 or 6 or 15?

KATE FOWLER: And maybe a little bit of a provocative question. But for people that are looking at fusion versus fission, fusion has all of these benefits over fission technology with respect to waste and the risk of meltdown and things like that. Do you think that fusion is going to replace fission in the future, or do you think there is room for both of those industries to continue to grow?

STUART ALLEN: Fusion replaces fission in the future. Possibly not in our lifetimes. I mean, the first thing that needs to be-- well, as we observe, we need to be meeting growing needs for electrical demand, and there are far more maligned sources of electricity generation than nuclear fission. So coal needs to go first globally, and then we can advance from there.

KATE FOWLER: All right. Those are the only questions I had. Was there anything else you wanted to add?

STUART ALLEN: No, it's been great. Thanks for taking the time.

KATE FOWLER: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

And our last conversation with developers is with Tokamak Energy.

I am here with Warrick Matthews, CEO of Tokamak Energy. Can you just give me a brief explanation of what Tokamak Energy is and what you guys are working on right now?

WARRICK MATTHEWS: Sure. So we are, amongst the fusion companies, quite an old fusion company. We're 17 years old. So we're originally spun out of the UK's National Lab. Our founders wanted to really drive forward a specific fusion device called a spherical tokamak. People know a conventional tokamak as the donut-shaped device that holds a mini star in a magnetic cage. A spherical one is just squished into a ball rather than a donut. It's more like a cored apple shape.

So the founders wanted to commercialize that and advance the technology in an ST. And we've taken that to a level where we have a very, very high-performing device on our site called ST40. It's a world record-breaking device for a private company. And we've got that now serving two governments in the future campaigns on that device.

But the other really important part of what we do is that for future spherical tokamaks or magnetically confined plasma devices, you need a superconducting magnet set. And maybe we'll come on and talk a bit more about superconductors, because they're very important for us.

But effectively, you are creating that magnetic field, but with a material that has zero electrical resistance. So it can be on all of the time, and it can maintain very strong magnetic fields to confine plasma.

And we have over a decade of working in what we call HTS, High-Temperature Superconducting systems. We've generated over 400 patents in that. We've got a very strong team. And an important thing we're doing now is taking all that technology to serve the broader fusion market as a design and make supplier, but also lots of other applications that rely on magnets.

KATE FOWLER: So I spoke with someone earlier today, and they actually said that the breakthroughs in HTS in the industry have taken fusion from possible to probable to likely.

WARRICK MATTHEWS: Yeah.

KATE FOWLER: So for those unfamiliar with HTS, can you just give a little more detail on what their purpose is? And what does that unlock for fusion that just was not possible before?

WARRICK MATTHEWS: Yeah. So coming back to a superconductor, what is it? So the world has known superconductors for a long time. They're referred to as LTS. Low-Temperature Superconductors have been around for a long time.

So a superconductor means that when you take that material to an operating temperature, which is usually very, very cold, it has zero electrical resistance. So not a bit, but zero, meaning you can put a lot of power through that. And you don't generate heat. You don't generate any losses, so it's quite a remarkable material. But the downside of the low-temperature superconductors-- things like niobium titanium is an example of that-- is that you've got to go really cold, to almost absolute 0, 4 degrees Kelvin--

KATE FOWLER: Very cold.

WARRICK MATTHEWS: To cool to that, you need liquid helium to cool that cold. And so fusion has kind of adopted it with older devices. And the ITER machine is an example of an LTS system. And certain other industries like MRI and NMR, which is a scientific instrument, have adopted that because of the benefits. It can generate strong magnetic fields.

HTS-- everything is relative in fusion, really. But HTS is a high-temperature superconductor. It's a material called ReBCO, Rare-earth Barium Copper Oxide. And importantly, that starts to superconduct at 80 Kelvin, which is a lot warmer, hence high temperature. And if you take it down to low temperatures of about 20, 30 Kelvin, you can generate very, very, very strong magnetic fields like 80, 90, 100 Tesla, incredibly strong and way beyond what fusion needs.

So you don't need liquid helium to cool that material. You can call it with off-the-shelf cryocoolers or liquid nitrogen, which is readily available. And it's much more accessible, and it generates much stronger fields.

How you would buy that superconductor is in what we call HTS tape. And if I was looking at a piece of that, you would think, that looks like a copper piece of ribbon. It's about 70 microns thick, the ribbon. But within it, the superconductor is only 2 microns. So imagine 2% of a human hair. And imagine that that thin, thin layer can carry 4,000 amps of current with no losses.

And in fusion, we use that to wind it into coils that are magnets. We've got a shape in the middle of a structure where passing a strong current through the material creates a very strong magnetic field. But we've also been able to start commercializing this into a range of other applications, both for very strong magnets for science or motors or defense applications, but most recently using it for power distribution. No magnet. Just very, very efficient way to move power. And the lead market for that is next-generation data centers.

KATE FOWLER: You've actually answered all my questions that I had already, because I was going to ask you about the breakthrough, and where did that extend past fusion? So you said you're manufacturing right now. Are you manufacturing at scale, or is that-- with all the things that it can do, is the demand for that increasing? And to be commercially viable, you're going to need to continue to expand. I guess, where are you in that production process?

WARRICK MATTHEWS: Yeah, so that's a good question. And it sort of brings about the what's the supply chain question. We would describe where Tokamak Energy has got to now as a full stack HTS product company. Full stack means, for us, from product design through to prototypes, through to manufacturing, and integration into a full system.

Importantly, we don't make the tape. The superconductor embedded in a tape is made by a growing number of companies around the world. And we decided not to make that, because we see it's not really our core skill set. And also, scaling that will drive down the cost and drive up the quality, and we want a supply chain to be doing the job of scaling it.

Where we play is everything above that. We take the tape. We make it into very, very high-field magnets, very robust magnet systems. And we added a company to our portfolio last year. We bought a company called Ridgway Machines who are in the UK, and they make very big machines that can wind this material into specific designs of cables or magnets. And we bought them so we could scale up more rapidly. So we are taking investment coming into our company, really dialing it into the HTS products and scaling that up starting in the UK, but with plans to expand into Japan and into the US.

KATE FOWLER: So your magnets that you're creating, your HTS magnets, so are those being used for other fusion technologies, other developers are using yours?

WARRICK MATTHEWS: Yeah.

KATE FOWLER: I think that's a little bit unique in the industry that I think in fusion, I see people seem to be a little bit more collaborative. It seems like you all want to succeed together. I guess you come from a more competitive industry, I think, where you used to be. So what is that like, having this burgeoning industry that's starting to grow and have events like this where they are a little bit more collaborative?

WARRICK MATTHEWS: Yeah. You know, I think it's just-- this industry is maturing, and it's establishing the supply chain setup. Because a playbook that says, if you want to build a fusion device, well, first you'd better build a factory, and then you'd better fill it full of really expensive machines, and then you'd better recruit a workforce to make the thing that you actually want, which is a magnet or a cable, which is a small part of the system of this big machine that you're trying to build.

Now, if that is a jet engine, which is my background at Rolls-Royce aerospace, I controlled a global supply chain. Rolls-Royce didn't make everything. It chose a few things where it had specific core IP or it was critical to the functioning of the machine. But we also had a very developed design and make supply chain. Rolls-Royce or GE don't make the fuel system for their engine. They don't make the pneumatics system. They would go to a company like Parker, for example.

And I think that's what fusion is finding its footing on of, you want integrated companies that are building power plants, and they're integrating different parts of that system. And the magnet system is going to become a design and make part of the system. And by doing that, we can make them go quicker. We can develop more mature technology for them. And they don't have to make all the capital investment of trying to do everything themselves. So it makes sense. It's logical. But it's a brand new industry, and it's finding its way.

KATE FOWLER: So my background has been more so on the fission side of the industry. And obviously with SMRs, there's a lot talk about supply chain, and not just things like uranium and equipment, but also human resources. I guess, do you see the fusion industry doing better in that space right now? Do you have the massive concerns with supply chain for things like magnets and human resources? Or is it pretty comparable to what the fission industry is seeing?

WARRICK MATTHEWS: Probably quite comparable. And on the supply chain side, there are some specific areas that we've really got to grow capacity. And back to the high-temperature superconducting tape, that's one of those. There are established players, but demand outstrips supply, and it will just continue to do that in the future.

So we need, at a country level, countries like the US, like the UK, like Japan to be really ramping up supply of the HTS material. China is doing that. China is commoditizing it, and they're racing. And that's good for the market. It drives the cost down. But not good from a geopolitical risk point of view.

And then on people, I think it's another good argument to not have every company trying to do everything themselves, because you end up fighting for exactly the same talent pools. And all you do is drive up your cost base by people getting more and more expensive.

So if you can have a company like Tokamak Energy come in and become a magnet foundry, effectively, the foundry model like you see in semiconductor, then that makes a lot of sense. You consolidate skills. But the whole industry's got a lot of work to do, starting at school level and getting to kids early and selling the vision of this industry for the future to really boost skills for the future.

KATE FOWLER: Is there anything else you wanted to add?

WARRICK MATTHEWS: I don't think-- well, maybe one point. I think what we're developing in our company, you can see we are a collaborator, and we do want to work with other fusion companies. And we are already working at both government program level, but also private fusion companies to advance them. And I can look at that as, well, that's good for our investors, because we're building a business for that reason.

But also, I think there are bigger messages that we want to give governments around the world as well, that fusion is often seen as this pursuit of the holy grail. You've got a ton of investment coming in, and someone's trying to race for that prize. And different commentators will say, well, it's five years away, 10 years away, 20 years away, whenever years away. We should recognize that the pursuit of fusion has developed breakthrough technologies that are transforming industries and creating brand new products on the back of that.

HTS is an example. If you make HTS the technology for MRI machines, for example, you have a much more accessible technology. That cooling challenge and everything else of a low-temperature superconducting system that exists today, you democratize that. Oh, and by doing that, you open up MRI to six billion people on the planet who don't have it today, which is a virtuous goal and is a huge business opportunity. And it's not just one example of that. We're creating very, very important critical defense technology with these superconductors as well.

So I think I'd just like to recognize that message. It's important for investors, governments alike, a little bit like the space race. It threw off incredible technologies, and fusion is doing the same.

KATE FOWLER: That's amazing. So it's not just about energy production. It's health. I mean, similar to the fission industry right now using medical isotopes and things like that.

WARRICK MATTHEWS: Exactly, yeah.

KATE FOWLER: I was not aware that the fusion industry was tracking in that direction as well from a humanitarian standpoint.

WARRICK MATTHEWS: So you have fusion and fission helping cure cancers and treat patients. It's all coming from this pursuit of this goal.

KATE FOWLER: That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it.

WARRICK MATTHEWS: Thank you.

KATE FOWLER: Next, I spoke with the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.

All right. I'm here with Sid Fowler, a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. Thanks for joining me today.

SID FOWLER: No, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

KATE FOWLER: All right. So first question-- and I've asked a few others this-- why fusion? Why now?

SID FOWLER: When I think about fusion, I think one thing that I really like and that makes it very exciting for me is the long time horizons that come with it. And absent some sort of new breakthrough in our understanding of physics, fusion is the most energy-dense power source we can think of. It's really the most efficient energy technology I think we can build.

So if we're able to commercialize it, or when we commercialize it, it's not a transitional technology. So many things are technology for this generation or technology for now. Fusion is something that could sit at the center of our global energy system for hundreds of years or millennia even. I mean, I think it's really reasonable to think that our descendants, thousands of years from now, will be using fusion to power their worlds.

And so I think that's what's exciting about being a part of this moment where we really stand in the cusp, I think, of seeing if we're able to get there with the technology. And that's also what makes it so consequential to pay attention to the frameworks, the legal and the insurance and the risk frameworks, because those help structure the ability of the developers to actually make this technology succeed.

KATE FOWLER: So with all this potential on the horizon, how is policy and the regulatory landscape actually evolving as the fusion sector evolves also?

SID FOWLER: So I think that's another thing that for me as an attorney in this sector is really exciting right now. So over the past several years, we've moved from debate over how we're going to regulate the technology to a decision by the NRC and by Congress in the ADVANCE Act of how they want to regulate it. And now we're seeing implementation.

So starting in about 2020, 2021, there began a big debate, or really more a series of ongoing conversations with the NRC about how the technology should be regulated. That culminated in 2023 when the commission voted unanimously to regulate fusion under the Part 30 framework. So regulating it as a materials facility like a particle accelerator rather than a fission machine like a nuclear power plant. Congress then reinforced that a little bit later with the ADVANCE Act that formally added fusion to the Atomic Energy Act, established that it is a kind of particle accelerator.

And Pillsbury's been right at the middle of that. We helped FI lead-- we helped lead FI's engagement with NRC on the Part 30 pathway. And so it's really exciting. Now, the proposed rule from the NRC just came out a few weeks ago. So now we're seeing the actual rule, the actual guidance. And so we're seeing the licensing architecture take shape, and we're able to get a sense of exactly how the technology will be regulated at the granular level. And I think we're only a few months away from the final rule in October, which puts us right there in finally achieving this milestone of regulatory certainty for the industry.

KATE FOWLER: OK. Regulatory certainty is really important, and that kind of flows into my next question. So once you've got the regulation in place, my world, the next step, is the insurance. So how is the regulation that is being created impact the insurance market for these fusion devices?

SID FOWLER: So I think one of the most impactful things about the regulatory framework is the fact that because it's regulated under Part 30 as a materials facility rather than as a fission facility, it means that fusion is going to fall outside of the mandatory insurance framework set up by Price-Anderson Act. So, as I'm sure you know, Price-Anderson Act, it applies to fission plants over a certain size. It requires them-- and the NRC requires them to carry mandatory insurance at certain levels, despite the individual makeup of the facility and participate in the risk pool. There's a very limited insurance market for that as well.

So instead, because it's regulated under Part 30, it means there's not that mandatory Price-Anderson Act financial protection regime. I think that's going to make the insurance market more dynamic. It's going to mean that insurance is going to be targeted more to the specific facility and the specific facility risk rather than a mandated one-size-fits-all framework that's applied to every facility.

KATE FOWLER: More risk-informed rather than cookie cutter that I would say we kind of see right now.

SID FOWLER: Yeah, and that's what Pillsbury's been saying from the get-go on behalf of FI and the industry, is we need a risk-informed framework that's able to accommodate a potentially really wide range of technologies coming out of the fusion sector. I mean, these people are developing amazing technologies, but that have a lot of different confinement pathways, different fuel types. And as a result, I think that's one reason that this flexibility is needed on the regulatory side. And that's also why I would imagine we're going to see a lot of flexibility and bespoke arrangements on the insurance side as well.

KATE FOWLER: All right. So what are some of the emerging legal issues that could actually shape the insurance and risk landscape in this sector right now?

SID FOWLER: So I think one thing that may be in your radar is the current case pending before the Supreme Court. It's Cotter Corp. versus the United States. That's a case that has to do with the liability of Department of Energy under the Price-Anderson Act to provide indemnity to damages resulting from nuclear materials downstream of-- downstream of the initial DOE contract.

And so as I said earlier, fusion machines are going to fall out of the Price-Anderson Act mandatory insurance scheme. But damages that could occur from radioactive materials or byproduct materials like the tritium fuel, for example, related to a fusion machine would still fall under the broader Price-Anderson Act framework. For example, federal jurisdiction and things like that. And one aspect of that is the Department of Energy is able to provide indemnity to contractors working on DOE projects that involve radioactive materials.

Cotter Corp., that case is going to decide how broad DOE's liability is. And so I think that's going to impact the risk, particularly to people further downstream of that initial contract, both on-- more so on the fission side, but to a potential degree on the fusion side if it's related to DOE contract.

KATE FOWLER: That's really interesting.

SID FOWLER: Yeah, one of my colleagues, MC Hammond, is following this really closely and has done a lot of work in this area.

KATE FOWLER: Yeah. Well, maybe we'll have to get him on at a later date whenever he can talk about everything.

SID FOWLER: Yeah.

KATE FOWLER: All right, so that's it for me. Do you have anything else that you want to add?

SID FOWLER: So I think my basic message to the insurance market is that fusion-- you always hear this saying that it's-- people joke, oh, it's always 20 years away. But I think that's no longer true. I don't think fusion is too early to matter. I don't think it's too far away to not be paying attention to it right now. We've seen, for example, here at FI's amazing conference 450 people with a sold-out crowd. Just a few years ago, it was 100 people.

It's growing really rapidly. Investment is growing really rapidly. The technology's maturing. The legal framework is rapidly taking shape. And so I think we're going to see competitive advantages from people surrounding the industry come from understanding fusion as its own risk class, as its own technology, understanding the nuances between facilities and approaches. And I think it's exciting. The world is really recognizing that it's not just repackaged vision or approaching it from that perspective.

KATE FOWLER: All right. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it.

SID FOWLER: Oh, thank you.

KATE FOWLER: These conversations reflect a sector moving forward with purpose. As fusion technology advances, the frameworks around it-- policy, legal, and risk-- are evolving just as quickly. Together, they point to a future where fusion energy is not just possible, but achievable. Thank you to all of our guests, and thank you for joining us today on The Atomic Effect.

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